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Dilemma of Creativity, Optimistic and Pessimistic Reflections over the Innovations of Digital Era (Part II)

TIn the era of digital communication, the rise of interactive technology has made it possible that creativities can change our lives promptly. Interactivity is no longer an abstract concept, but already pervaded every aspect of our lives, and it’s deeply influencing our future. Interface, once was the indispensable medium of digital revolution, connected the users and digital world. On the other side of the communication loop, men use their innate sense organs to perceive the material world. With an increasing number of artificial sensors implanting into the personal digital terminals, the interface is endowed with a complete new mission: Augmented Reality.

At the WWDC in April 2010, Steve Jobs announced that a new sensor was applied in the iPhone 4 -- the Three-axis Gyro, which was in the past only used as a precise instrument in the fields of aviation and navigation. Having heard of this message, the software developers in the press conference began to hail. This implantation offers iPhone 4 the capability to perceive its relative position changes in three dimensions. With the three-axis gyro, the developers have a strong presentiment that their possibilities of developing software for iPhone will be brought to a new level by this small sensor. Before this announcement, Apple had already implanted various sensors into iPhone. Some of them can imitate human senses, such as the traditional visual and sound receivers (camera and microphone); some of them can enhance our senses to become measurable and digital, such as the ambient light sensor, which can constantly measure the changes of the environmental light, the proximity sensor is capable to sense the relative distance between the mobile phone and the user, and the accelerometer is designed to detect the direction of gravity and its relative angle towards the ground. What is even more exciting is that some sensors now can work far beyond our sensation, such as the GPS and the gyro. All these sensors work synergeticly with the software and hardware systems. Together, they transform a PDA into a communication media between human begins and their entire physical environment. We have been dreaming to have the sixth sense, but now through these new technologies we may obtain even the seventh sense, eighth sense...... If the automobile was extension for legs, if the television was extension for eyes, and if the internet was extension for minds, the Augmented Reality is then the extension of our sensation to the material world in all dimensions.

Furthermore, as the Indian inventor Pranav Mistry had demonstrated to us, we can even replace the screen as interactive media with the synergy of an individual motion detecting system and an interface projector. In this way, the user interface can be projected onto any concrete surfaces, and we can execute all digital operations just through our gestures rather than sliding and clicking the mouse. Those are the innovations which are currently happening, not the special effects in the movie Minority Report.

The essential message of this revolution is, it suggested “the third way “ to us, that we may finally be released from the dilemma depicted in the films The Matrix and The Terminator: either the human beings will defeat the machines (computers or artificial intelligence) or the machines will rule the mankind. The reason why we kept ourselves entangled in these dualistic imaginations is that a thinking model has been presupposed: for human beings, the only way to interact with the so-called digital world was to be “plugged in” through a network terminal. By doing this, we actually separate the digital world from the material world, and set them against each other. However, the Augmented Reality can integrate these two worlds with various sensors. Users no longer face only one of them, but a “communal reality” shared by both. The boundary between the world of atoms and electrons is dissolving. It seems to be an appropriate moment to declare an age of true interaction has come.